Founded nearly four decades ago by Bob Jagelski, Pro Photo Supply began its fruitful journey as a single desk in a tiny office in Southeast Portland, Oregon. After many years of development, they have grown to be a brick and mortar camera store, photo lab, and rental house. Even with all of this growth the company still keeps its original goal in mind: making professional photography tools accessible.
To achieve this goal in the age of technological advancements, Pro Photo Supply has decided to make its appearance online. It's a great honor that Product Filter & Search by Boost Commerce has assisted the online store in enhancing customer experience via an optimized filter and site search.
Recently, we connected with Eriq Nelson - the Digital Platform Manager of Pro Photo Supply. “I can tell you with certainty that we've gotten a number of customers thanks to the improvements we've made using the application and that our customer satisfaction has gone up” - Eriq shared with us.
Let's see why and how this giant specialty photo retailer settled with the Product Filter & Search app on their digital transformation.
A struggle of Pro Photo Supply when building the product filters is the broad spectrum of photo backgrounds.
“Probably the best solution we've come up with is building a color and color family for our background collection. It would be impossible to do this without a custom filter.” - Eriq said.
Moreover, the Boost app is so easy to use and understand and is so well-documented that the Pro Photo Supply team hasn't had to reach out to our support team since they installed the app. All features are straightforward and users can find detailed guidelines on our Help Center.
We also had a small Q&A with Eriq to know more about the decision-making process.
Q: Why did you pick Product Filter & Search by Boost Commerce at that time?
A: As a specialty photo retailer we’ve got a broad catalog of very distinct categories. Each of these requires a different approach to organization and design to serve our customers best. Product Filter & Search allowed us to accommodate the varying needs of our products in a way we weren’t able to achieve without it.
However, Eriq and his team didn't choose our app in the first place. After testing with a number of solutions on the Shopify App Store, they decided to go with Boost Product Filter & Search because of its user-friendliness and customizability. On the other hand, most of the other solutions they tried required major rework on the data management techniques or substantial technical investments upfront.
Q: What do you think is the biggest difference between our app and other apps in the same category?
A: We tried a dozen or so different apps before we landed on Boost’s solution. The biggest differentiator was the speed that we were able to get up and running.
Digital transformation is a long-term strategy that requires a lot of consideration and effort. The technical parts are considered the most challenging as brick-and-mortar stores usually don't have IT staff. Besides his experience with our app, we also asked Eriq how his team successfully grows in the digital world. Pro Photo Supply has managed to crash the technical wall in 2 ways: building in-house talents and collaborating with partners.
“There are tons of technical challenges that we’ve had to overcome to get where we are today. Building that experience and expertise in-house while finding the right partners to help us move where we want to go has been a tough, but worthwhile challenge.”
We also believe that internal forces are the main drivers of business success. And with the help of appropriate partners, that journey will be more pleasant.
We are thankful to accompany more than 13,000 Shopify merchants and help them leverage growth with advanced technology in product filters and site search.
Thanks Eriq and Pro Photo Supply team for your sharing and for giving us a chance to contribute to your accomplishments!
Read more success stories from our customers here.
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